‘People in the Republic don’t understand unionists. But they don’t understand northern nationalists either’

As a student in Belfast in the mid-1990s, Mary C Murphy had a part-time job in Primark; at the end of each shift, one of her tasks was to check the store for incendiary devices.
“For me, coming from the South, it was just horrifying that was part of your day, but it very quickly became normalised,” she says.
“There were some pretty stark cultural differences for a 22-year-old who’s grown up in Waterford arriving in Belfast in 1995, but you quickly adapt and you find your space. You learn all these different cues – when and where to go and who to speak to, and when to stay quiet, which is the way it would have been for people living in Northern Ireland at that time.
“I became accustomed to living my life in a slightly different way to what I had known up until that point.”
Murphy came north for a year, to study for a Master’s in Politics at Queen’s University Belfast, and ended up staying for eight.
“I did feel very lucky to be there at that time, and for all the sorts of difficulties and challenges that came with living in Belfast, I loved every minute of it. I made great friends there and Queen’s was a wonderful place to be, and things were changing. There was an air of hope, an air of positivity about Northern Ireland.”
In the years since, she has watched it change and, as an academic, has contributed to our understanding of those changes; her lived experience on both sides of the Border, and her research expertise, make her ideally placed to do so.
Murphy’s PhD was in “a very niche subject”: Northern Ireland’s relationship with the European Union. She’s been a lecturer at University College Cork since 2003 – and from 2023 the head of its Department of Government and Politics – and Brexit sent her research mainstream. She was among the first to publish a book on its implications for the North.
Now that expertise has taken Murphy across the Atlantic, to Boston College, where she was headhunted, though she rejects the suggestion – “the way I would put it is, they reached out to me and asked me would I be interested in applying for the post” – for the role of professor and head of the university’s prestigious Irish Institute.
A Jesuit institution founded in the 19th century to educate the children of Irish emigrants, Boston College is known for its Irish programme as well as the so-called Boston Tapes – a controversial oral history project in which ex-paramilitaries made admissions about their role in the Troubles. Of this she says: “The tapes were before my time so I’m not in a position to speak with any authority about what happened, and the Institute is separate from the tapes.
“But I suppose the Boston College tapes spoke to Boston College’s interest in Ireland, and building on that interest in Ireland is very much something I’m looking forward to.” Irish links have long been the cornerstone of the college’s identity.
The Irish Institute is one of the ways in which the college honours that association; former US senator George Mitchell, who chaired the negotiations that led to the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998, hailed the “critical work” of the institute “in helping further the peace process and in building meaningful ties in civil society across the island of Ireland”.
“Typically, it has been a historian who has led the Irish Institute,” says Murphy, “so in a way I think they’re contemporarising the role by bringing in a political scientist.
“At this moment in time, with my appointment, there’s a recognition that there is a new phase in terms of Northern Ireland’s trajectory, in terms of the island of Ireland as a whole, in terms of relations with Britain, relations between Ireland and the European Union and, of course, the wider EU-American relationship.
“Twenty-five years since the Good Friday [Belfast] Agreement, I think the Irish Institute understands there are perhaps new priorities, new challenges, many of which are linked to the ongoing peace process. But there’s a recognition that maybe some of the conversations need to adapt and change in response to the various different challenges that have emerged.”
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Murphy lists just some of these challenges: immigration, racism, the changed and changing relationships on and between these islands, and the continued failure to achieve reconciliation in Northern Ireland.
It is to state the obvious to point out that these are big questions; we discuss last year’s research by The Irish Times and the ARINS project at the Royal Irish Academy and the University of Notre Dame that found two-thirds of people in the South said they had no friends in the North, more than 80 per cent had no relations there and more than half had not travelled across the Border in the past five years.
“I think there’s definitely a case that people in the Republic of Ireland don’t really know or understand Northern Ireland, and I think it’s just a fact of the way it’s been,” says Murphy.
She lists some of the differences; political systems, experiences of conflict, schools, health services and the domination of the Catholic Church in the South for many years.
“There are very different lived experiences on both sides of the Border. It’s bound to affect the way in which you perceive the other and the way in which you understand the other, and as we start to have conversations about the constitutional future, the question arises, do we need to know each other better?
“There are different perspectives on this. I would innately think, yeah, we probably do need to know each other a little better but … that isn’t necessarily a prerequisite to contemplating constitutional change.”
Murphy describes her own family’s experience. “I was the first person in my family to go to Northern Ireland. My parents had never been there and some of my family still haven’t been. There is a physical distance but there’s a psychological distance as well, between North and South. How problematic that is, I think, is something we have to work out in terms of having conversations about the future of the island.
“The other part of this is that there’s always an assumption that people in the Republic of Ireland don’t understand unionists in Northern Ireland, but I think there’s also a point to be made about people … not understanding nationalists in Northern Ireland either.
“There are lots of complexities here, and I certainly don’t have the answers, but I think I’m aware of some of the questions we can ask, and some of the ways in which we need to think about North-South relations.”
There is much else to be thought about. Brexit has been “hugely destabilising … there’s really nothing good to say about the Brexit period, it’s really about managing the fallout”.
The Labour victory in the UK and the restoration of the Northern political institutions are among the factors that have helped stabilise the situation, she says.
“I think we should have some degree of positivity about how this can be managed going forward. One of the most important factors for Northern Ireland in the years ahead is political leadership … it will play a crucial role in terms of dictating the extent to which that process of stabilisation can continue.”
As for the debate around constitutional change, “it’s kind of ebbed and flowed a little bit in the last 12 months or so,” she says. “At one time, certain forces were suggesting inevitability to the likelihood of constitutional change – I think that’s not necessarily the case now.
“It’s related to the fact that there is a new British government, the institutions are up and working and, of course, it’s related to Sinn Féin’s election woes in the South.
“In a peace process situation, stability is what you try and nurture – and that’s not to suggest that constitutional change cannot or should not happen … but in order to have some of those conversations, I think you need to start from a stable plane.”
In the years ahead, there will be much to consider. “It’s really exciting,” says Murphy, “that this role is giving me an opportunity to continue the research I’m doing, but also knowing it has, at least to some degree, social value here in Boston, and hopefully a degree of political value back home on the island of Ireland.”
Just as the institute has played a past role in the peace process, her hope is that it can also play a role in reconciliation, and not just in Northern Ireland.
“The world itself is becoming increasingly polarised and I think it’s important we recognise that, and that we do our best to address it,” says Murphy. “It’s underpinned by some very complex problems which are experienced, in many different ways, across most of the world, so I think some of these conversations could be mutually beneficial in terms of teasing out some of the possible ways of addressing and resolving those problems.
“We can look at bringing people to the table who can speak with authority and with an evidence base to these questions. They can be scholars from back home but, equally, we can draw on scholars here in the United States who might be looking at these issues from a different prism – for example, the black community here in Boston.”
Murphy’s goal is for the institute to “continue to be a hub for conversations between various different people from a variety of different backgrounds and from both sides of the Atlantic”.
“I think the ambition will be to have a sort of two-way dialogue between Boston and Ireland and the UK and the EU, recognising that Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, sits within the European framework, and that Northern Ireland has a very particular relationship with the EU post Brexit.
“I hope we can bring scholars here who can contribute to these discussions and hold conferences and round tables and provide some sort of quiet, private spaces as well, where that might be useful. In the longer term, it would be great to think that we could do some targeted research around some of these questions about the US-Irish relationship and all its various different dimensions.
“We’re committed to enabling and empowering the Irish Institute to be a very useful and constructive place in terms of making a contribution to stability and prosperity and peace back home on the island of Ireland.”
She has other goals, too. Academia “can be quite a male-dominated space, so I do welcome the fact that they took on a woman for the role. It’s good for younger female scholars to be able to look up to a senior female scholar. It goes back to that whole thing about you can’t be it if you don’t see it”.
“Throughout my career, being able to – there weren’t very many of them but being able to look up to female professors who were ahead in profession and respected, and have their support, that was important for me.
“I would hope I could be that for the next generation.”